The average American watches thirty-two hours of TV a week. That’s more than the average American spends working.
If those people die at seventy-eight and don’t watch any television until they’re sixteen (for the sake of argument) they’ll have over eleven and half years of passive viewing to look back on. That’s twenty-four hours a day for eleven and a half years.
When those people die, are they going to look back during their last, fearful moments—wondering if each gasp will be the last their cancerous body can take—and say to themselves: “Well, I didn’t make too much of a difference, but I did an eleven and half year stint watching TV?” Even for those not measuring their own lives, it seems like any deity in the great hereafter would be severely unimpressed by such usage of the life granted.
It would be interesting to calculate how much of that was spent watching advertisements. But, I’m out of time— House is on.